WSJ. Magazine’s 2015 Entertainment/Film Innovator is a Hollywood icon, humanitarian activist and the writer-director of this month’s ‘By the Sea’

The most noticeable thing about Angelina Jolie Pitt—apart from her almost preternatural physical presence—is that nearly everywhere she goes she turns up more or less unattended (unless, of course, you count husband Brad Pitt and their brood of six). Arriving for an interview at a West Hollywood hotel suite to promote By the Sea, her upcoming movie with Pitt, she’s trailed only by a lone bodyguard—she doesn’t employ a manager or even a publicist. A few weeks earlier, photos of the Jolie-Pitt clan’s visit to a Subway in Glendale, California, had been splashed across multiple websites (“They’re just like us!”), but the trip from which Jolie Pitt has returned just before the interview—an outing to a lakeside retreat the couple owns near Pitt’s hometown of Springfield, Missouri—had gone entirely unnoticed. (“It’s a real Midwestern family kind of place,” says Tom Brokaw, who got to know Jolie Pitt during the making of her most recent film, Unbroken. “His whole family comes down, cousins, you name it.”) Likewise, the couple’s wedding ceremony at their château in the south of France in August 2014 was not followed by a romantic getaway featuring the typical telescopic paparazzi shots of sunbathing on a yacht. The two went back to work almost immediately, shooting the new film together on a tiny island in Malta, “while our children ran around the set,” says Pitt. “That this became our honeymoon is just f—ing funny.”

All this under-the-radar normalcy would not be noteworthy in the least if the two stars weren’t the most staggeringly high-profile Hollywood couple since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (except with only three divorces between them and not nearly as much booze or bling). This month, in By the Sea, they’ll appear together for the first time in a decade, since the action-packed romp Mr. and Mrs. Smith introduced them to the world as a couple onscreen and (subsequently, they insist) off. Though the new film, by Jolie Pitt’s own account, is a “small” one, it will likely attract a lot of interest in the media juggernaut known as Brangelina—especially since the story involves a couple whose marriage is in deep crisis. The movie, set in an isolated seaside hotel in France, lays them emotionally bare in a way they’ve rarely been seen before, and certainly not together.

“It was not easy,” says Jolie Pitt. “We just had to be brave and say, ‘OK, honey, we’re strong enough to do this; let’s somehow use this to make us stronger.’ ” Jolie Pitt wrote the script, her first, not long after her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died in 2007. “I didn’t really know if I could make film and I didn’t think I could write film, so I wrote with a certain amount of freedom,” she says. “I gave myself the task that it would be about grief and how different people react to and process it.” In one scene, the local barkeep (played by a remarkable French actor, Niels Arestrup) talks to Pitt’s character, who is trying to restart a foundering writing career, about forcing himself to love his terminally ill wife enough to let her go. “That’s me speaking about my mother,” Jolie Pitt says. “I think maybe his character came from the purest place inside me.”

The most difficult scenes of the film were made harder by the fact that “we had to stay in our corners, like boxers, and not be husband and wife,” Jolie Pitt says. “It was very hard to do those scenes without Brad and I taking care of each other. Normally in between takes, you’d make sure that the other’s OK, but we had to be able to really get ugly.” At the end of the day, she adds, it was the kids who kept them from staying in character. “That might have been an absolute disaster. But as soon as we got home, it was bedtime stories, children’s needs and problems, the fights they’d had during the day. We had to immediately snap back to something that was uniting and positive and loving.”

For Pitt, By the Sea marked the first time he’d been directed by a woman, let alone his own wife, but he professes not to see the difference. The main thing, he says, is that the director has “the reins on the story and taste in the telling” so that the actors have “freedom to explore.” In his case, he adds, “My director has an elegant intuition for character. And anyway, I trust her with my life.” Occasionally, though, their husband-wife ease on set was a double-edged sword. “Being a couple, we have that shorthand that can be communicated in a look. Conversely, it means I knew immediately if she felt a take stunk.”

If By the Sea—the third feature film Jolie Pitt has directed—could not be further in intent or plot from the couple’s comic debut, it’s consistent with Jolie Pitt’s pattern of taking on risky projects. As a director and screenwriter, she came out of the box in 2011 with In the Land of Blood and Honey, a romantic drama set in a place—1990s war-torn Bosnia—most Americans had managed to ignore. As a rule, actors who direct for the first time tend toward slightly less complicated fare; even Tom Hanks went with a comedy/drama about a one-hit-wonder rock band in the 1960s. Jolie Pitt’s period piece touched on issues of rape and captivity, was cast with local unknowns and was filmed simultaneously in Bosnian and English. Though ultimately well received, the film was hardly an obvious bet. “She called me to take a look at the script and after about 25 pages, I remember thinking, Wait, I have to go back and read this again,” says Graham King, the Oscar-winning producer (The Departed, Argo) who ended up investing in and producing the film with Jolie Pitt. “I did not expect Bosnia. It was an extremely bold choice for a first-time screenwriter.”

Likewise, she campaigned hard to direct 2014’s Unbroken, the film based on Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling bio of Olympic runner and war hero Louis Zamperini, despite the fact that the technical issues of filming the air-and-sea sequences would make for an especially brutal shoot. “Angie is not fearless; almost no one is,” says Hillenbrand. “But she is intrepid and bold and willing to look down her fears and do things anyway.”

One of those fears stemmed from the love Jolie Pitt ended up feeling for the subject himself. “The bond between her and Louis was uncommon between filmmaker and subject, and she was very afraid of not getting Louis’s story right,” Hillenbrand says. “I felt the same enormous sense of obligation when I interviewed him and the other prisoners of war. These are the most painful, personal memories in these men’s lives. But she threw her whole heart and soul into it.”

Hillenbrand says she was reassured that her book was in the right hands when Jolie Pitt, whom she now refers to as “a sister,” called to inquire about the uniforms of a high school track team Zamperini had raced against in the 1930s. Hillenbrand, known for her meticulous period research, had no idea what they looked like. “But I knew from the question that I could relax. It was a pleasing question to get even though it was impossible!”

This is an unofficial non-profit fansite dedicated to Angelina Jolie in hopes to help promote her career, the causes she supports and to help fans finding information, media and the latest news. It first came online in 2001 and has been online back and forth under different domains, and is now back online at angelina-jolie.com since early 2017.

This site has no official affiliation with Angelina Jolie or her agents - it is run by fans for fans. The webmaster(s) of this website claim no ownership to any material seen on this website and is used, to the best of their knowledge, under the "Fair Use" copyright laws.